So, I want to animate a sphere. I am only animating one attribute: the X axis size. I want the size to start at 40, 40, 40 and end at -40, 40, 40. Well, the sphere shrinks to 0,0,0 instead of 0,40,40 in the center of the two keyframes. I've tried to add more keyframes in between, but as soon as the object goes to negative size Bryce shrinks it to 0,0,0 If you understood that, then do you have any ideas for a workaround? TIA

In Bryce, if you try to change any of the size axes of an object to a negative number, you are actually changing all size axes of that object to a negative number. If you'll check the Objects/Attributes for the last frame of your animation, I think you'll find that the size is -40,-40,-40, not -40,40,40. So naturally if you go from 40,40,40 to

-40,-40,-40 the center of the animation is 0,0,0. The way the geometry of the sphere is set up in Bryce, you can not mix negative sizes with positive sizes at the same time, because the sphere can not be a negative size and a positive size at the same time (think about it). I think the basic thing that's happening here is that you're turning the sphere into its own mirror image over time and also spinning it -180 degrees on the x rotation axis, but it would just shrink to nothing and re-expand to the original size...maybe if you had a texture that was oriented to the object (not the world) it would be mirror reversed in the last frame, I don't really know. I'm curious about what you want the animation to look like. Maybe you can do it through some other method than resizing the sphere. Hope this helps. :^)

The - after the word "not" in the fifth line of my previous post is suppose to belong to the next line. I could not get it to stop treating it like a hyphen. Sorry.

Aye, good job Tjohn, very technical but it is accurate. For a workaround, JohnPenn, perhaps makea second sphere and leave it hidden until the negativity begins, then hide the first one and run the rest of the operation on the secod, negative-er sphere? Just an idea, I'm not even sure Bryce can keyframe hidden-ness...

I think that shadow might have a trick that'll work. My ultimate workaround would be to key it when the width gets .001 and again at -.001 but I'd rather not fuss if I don't have to. I'll give it a whirl in a minute. Anyway, Here's an animated gif of the transformation. (Actually I want to animate foliage, but this shows the idea)

Oh, yeah, it flips the image too. I forgot to say that. I tried to force it not to flip, but it started to spin

Here's another of my deluge of posts. Sorry. Anyway, I tried it with the key frames at .001 and it worked. There is one frame that needs to be removed, but I left it in there to illustrate the problem with this method. Ideally, it would render perfectly... Ideally, but this is Bryce we're working with. ;) I'll try shadow's idea next.

Well, it seems that shadow is right. You can't animate hidden. Oh well, I have something that kind of works... I don't know if I'll use it though, I really want a "perfect" solution. Maybe I'll email Corel and let them know about the bug. Thanks for the tips so far, and if anyone has anything else to add, please do! Thanks again!

Aye, you can't animate hidden, but you can animate transparency! Perhaps using this will help in your keyframing...? Good luck!

Well, I did what I could, and made this little .gif file. I had to postwork it because 2 of the frames were just plain wrong. Inspired by alex's recent flower models, (I had tinkered with posable flowers a while ago, but left it for dead) I thought it might be fun to see if I could not only make some flowers in Bryce, but animate them to get a time lapse camera effect. In this gif, I didn't animate the sun, and I didn't create a background because I'm still testing this all out to determine whether it's feasible to do all the post work on all the different frames. I ultimately envision a bed flowers, maybe some grass, an animated sun, and if I am really ambitions a little wind jitter. It's not likely that it's going to happen though -- too much tedious work. But who knows. Either way, I though I'd post the results so that anyone interested can see my workaround... Though, I'm still convinced that there has to be a better way to do it.

Wow, this is very nice. So this was what you had in mind. Is each petal a mapped sphere going through a size change? Amazing that you could picture this in your mind. Way beyond my capacities.

Thanks, tjohn! It's really just kind of one thing leading to another. I decided that I could make a petal by mapping a simple pic to a sphere (I'll post the pic tomorrow, it's at work). From there I thought about animating, and from there I thought about the curvature. It didn't all hit me at once, and I'm sure that you could do it as well. It's one sphere for each petal that is parented to an invisible sphere inside the the center of the flower. So, I rotate the parent spheres, and the petals "hinge" open. At the same time, the size of the sphere changes from positive to negative so they bend along the way . (2 frames in the center of the animation had to be removed / edited because the positive-negative shift). It's all just moving balls that are mostly transparent. I never get all the ideas at once, it always starts small and leads e away!

Here's the pic I made in Photoshop for the petal (there's not really much to it) It's mapped to "Object Top" and I added a slight bump map to give ti some grit. The colors are set in the Materials Editor under Diffusion and Ambience.